The 2-gigawatt deal covers tens of billions of dollars’ worth of chips, as AMD plans to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic

Advanced Micro Devices AMD 8.11%increase; up pointing triangle and Anthropic have signed a deal for tens of billions of dollars’ worth of artificial-intelligence servers, strengthening AMD’s competitive position against industry leader Nvidia NVDA 1.97%increase; up pointing triangle and supplying Anthropic with much needed computing power.

Under the terms of the agreement, Anthropic will purchase up to 2 gigawatts of AMD’s latest-generation chips, called the Instinct MI450, starting in the first half of 2027. AMD will also invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic—its first check into the AI firm—as certain deployment milestones are met.

“We have very much wanted to be a major part of their infrastructure,” AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su said, adding that the companies’ engineering teams have been working together for some time.

Anthropic runs computing workloads across chips including Google’s tensor-processing units, Amazon.com’s Trainium chips, and Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs. As part of the deal, Anthropic will buy some AMD chips for its own data centers, as well as lease some of the capacity via other large cloud providers or neoclouds. Anthropic and AMD are working together to identify data centers for the chips, Su said.

“You can’t just wake up one morning and say, ‘Oh, I want a gigawatt of compute tomorrow,’” Su said. “You actually have to plan, you know, 12, 18, 24 months in advance for what you want.”

AMD is also in talks to provide a financial backstop for Anthropic’s future data-center leases as well, according to a person with direct knowledge of the talks.

Large technology companies with investment-grade credit ratings have increasingly been in talks to back the leases or debt of AI startups that otherwise wouldn’t be able to raise capital at favorable terms. Google has agreed to backstop some data-center deals to help Anthropic access its TPUs, for instance.

AMD has spent the past few years racing to build its position in the market for selling GPUs. The company has benefited from a surge in demand from AI developers seeking to diversify away from Nvidia. It recently signed large deals with OpenAI and Meta Platforms and is competing to win over younger AI startups as customers.

Su said AMD had signed an engineering collaboration with Anthropic, in which it will use the company’s Claude models to improve the performance of its chip technology.

AMD’s chips are generally less in demand than Nvidia’s, partly because AI companies are less familiar with operating the software needed to run the company’s chips. AMD extended sweeteners to win big customers, including offering them warrants, or future shares, in the company.

The AMD deal will help Anthropic to further meet the surge in demand for its AI tools that have turned it into the front-runner of the AI race. The sudden demand forced Anthropic to limit how much its users could engage with its AI services, with some customers reporting frequent outages.

Earlier this year, Anthropic signed new deals with cloud giants Google and Amazon, as well as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which recently began building a business selling excess data-center capacity that it had accumulated.

somebody the other day mentioned getting together for advanced ai, we can even remain anonymous lol. who's down to meet up and any thoughts on time and place?

edit: let's meet at Yerba Buena Gardens tomorrow after the first day of the conference ends

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

So like I lovvvvvve the Anthropic Deal when you consider AMD is being validated with one of the top AI solutions out there. I'm a huge fan of Claude vs ChatGPT at the moment. ChatGPT is for the consumer but Claude feels more for the workers. I dunno just my thoughts. So the fact that they are using AMD chips to me makes it feel like we are making some strong in-roads into the enterprise/worker segment. Might not be sexy but its like there is a reason why the world runs on Excel. So I like that part.

What I don't like is that we have to invest in them. I've long felt like the current AI structure isn't sustainable. I thought Chamath whatever his last name is did have a good comment on CNBC last week about looking at AI compute as a commodity. These advance models are selling a barrel of compute at a non-sustainable price. And I think that truly is a problem. So us having to "invest" in them so they can buy our chips feels like double dealing and like we could be investing in a loser. We will get the short term bump from the sales sure but we won't have a longer term customer if they can't figure out a way to right the ship and make it profitable.

The market is punishing us for the spend here. Remember when everyone was pissed that AMD was going out and buying companies?? Personally I would rather us be gobbling up smaller firms and tech platforms than giving money to customers to buy our products. But hey thats just me.

AMD got above the trendline yesterday and I was optimistic that we might have recaptured the momentum but today's open is going to put us firmly back below again and kill the movement from eysterday.

I agree with the comment from yesterday that this is the "rally the entire market hates." I just don't know how to feel about it. But I'm not a buyer I'm clearly in the fade the trade mode. But I did have a sell order in yesterday for the $550 line which has been our resistance point but it never hit. Sooooooooo blehhhh winsome lose some. But In 3 days we had a roughly $100 swing in price action for AMD. IF you timed it right that is a 20% movement there. Capturing part of that move is a winner for sure if you are playing the swings.